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Wednesday, May 31, 2017

The Great Pie-Off

Our friends and family enjoy a good food competition. This is the third in our "sanctioned" series to get your name on the winner's board. Whose pie would reign supreme?

Memorial Day Weekend seemed like the perfect time to host the third installment of our friends and family cook-off. So we sent out the alert: a pie off and BBQ was coming!! Everyone got out their rolling pins and their thinking caps and went to work. Since my brother K.C. has won the title at both the Poultry Grill-off and the Chili Cook-off, he definitely had a target on his back. Everyone was gunning for his pie. Baking isn't really his calling, so he wasn't feeling all that confident going into it. Even still, we all knew he was going to be stiff competition and we had better bring our A game if we were going to get somebody else's name on the board.

Originally we were going to grill some hamburgers and have everyone bring sides. Then the poultry grill-off champ himself offered to bring over his smokers and do whole chickens. Of course we quickly jumped at the chance. He has a few smoker options, but has been having fun playing with his barrel smokers lately. So, he quickly whipped up a second one. He is one of my two brothers who live caddy-corner from us. So it was kind of comical watching him bring the smokers over. First he carted over the barrels. Then he lit the fires at his house and actually carried them over. I really wish I had gotten a picture of that, it was a site to see. You know what else I missed getting a picture of? The 12 whole chickens on the smokers! Darn it!

Oh well, you'll just have to take my word one the spectacle of it all. He got the chickens going as the folks started rolling in. Everyone was great about covering up their pies so nobody knew what everyone else had made. Matt had a super secret system developed to help keep the anonymity. Each pie was given a number. The number corresponded to a letter and that his how the pies were judged. So people didn't even know their own letter. Of course, most people had a pretty good idea which pie was their own anyway!

Everyone brought the most beautiful pies! There was such a great variety of flavors and designs. There was beautiful lattice work, perfect pecans, creamy fillings and fabulous fruits. Unfortunately we had to butcher them to do the tasting. Everyone got two plates filled with a taste of each pie next to the corresponding letters. They also got three chips for voting and fork for tasting. It was a rough job, but everyone took their pie tasting duties seriously.

They were all sooooooo good! There wasn't a pie in the bunch that I would turn my nose up at eating. In fact, I would be perfectly pleased with any of the pies! That made voting so hard. My husband kept saying he wished he had given out more voting chips because narrowing down the choices was too difficult. He thought there were too many that deserved a vote.

He was probably right, but in the end you only had three votes and you had to use them wisely. The votes were tallied and the winner was announced. My husband's cousin Liz won with her pecan pie. It really was an amazing pie! We were told that nobody else in the family will make pies for Thanksgiving anymore because hers is so good and we could all see why.

I really should have people bring their recipes along to these things! What kind of pie would you make for a pie-off?

11 comments:

Look at all those scrumptious pies! I am drooling all over the computer! I love that you guys do these cook off's. I would make my famous old fashion cream pie. It is my most requested pie recipe and is the original recipe from a local Amish restaurant that's been around for 50 years. I hope you have a wonderful Wednesday beautiful lady!

Thanks for hosting such a fun event. I was really happy to see the effort that went into these pies! It was fun to read about. I would imagine even those that could not be there will enjoy knowing how you did this and seeing the beautiful pies. We should have required a recipe with the pies that were entered. I'm sure I'm not the only one that would enjoy having the recipes.

Your pie-off sounds like so much fun! And so much deliciousness :). I have no idea what kind of pie I'd make but I have a feeling it would involve chocolate, although that winning pecan pie sounds dang good too! Hope your week is going well, Carlee!